Destroyed
by blueyellowgreen
Summary: In a galaxy finally free of the Reapers, Kaidan Alenko struggles between duty and conscience, James Vega receives a warning message about his father and Joker deals with the loss of everything he held dear. Will also feature stories for Liara, Javik, Tali, Garrus, Grunt and a few others.
1. Shepard -- Dr Chakwas

**June 8, 2186 CE: London**

**Three Weeks Post Reaper War**

The midnight air is still. People are still afraid to leave their homes, but Shepard has to get to the banshee corpse.

She'd spotted it that afternoon when Cortez had taken her to the temporary Alliance hospital in central London for her daily check-up, its grotesque open mouth gaping at her from across the street outside of the shuttle.

They spent nights in the shuttle now, Shepard curled up in the co-pilot's chair and Cortez in the back. The Alliance had offered her an apartment, but she no longer cared to sleep anywhere with windows or mirrors. Unlike Admiral Hackett, who still calls her at least twice a day to figure out what he can do to get her into the apartment - and, in his words, "Get her head back on straight" - Cortez simply accepted her reasons and agreed to let her use the shuttle as a temporary home.

"Whatever will make you feel safe, Commander," he told her, looking directly into her eyes uncomfortably. She knew why: her hair was singed off, her scalp laced with metal stitching, so he couldn't look up, and her right leg was mostly gone, so he couldn't look down.

Cortez is a heavy sleeper, which had made it easy to take his rifle from the Kodiak's weapons locker and slip out the hatch. She has to make sure it's dead. She looks down at her right thigh, knowing that under the pant leg the offending limb is just scarred, concave remain with some kind of mechanized metal beam threaded through where her bone should have been. It might have been better if they'd just chopped it off rather than to leave her looking like...like a human-geth hybrid of some kind.

_Shepard-Commander, why did you kill us?_

She can see the banshee as she gets closer to the road. The ones that were killed after turning were incinerated by their own biotics when they died; this one was either killed before it had turned completely or it was still alive. Ignoring the pain that laces through her legs, she climbs through a blackened crater and makes her way across the remains of the road to the banshee, lifting the gun in that old familiar motion that comes to her nearly as easily as breathing.

And she shoots.

Her first and second shots hit it right between the eyes, but it's still staring at her and she can't stop because if it weren't for this creature she wouldn't be carrying this guilt, this well-deserved but unbearable guilt that burns her like acid. She took her first life when she was nineteen. Thirteen years later she's taken a half million.

Behind her, she hears running footsteps, but she keeps firing: she can't bring herself to fire for the Normandy, gone for going on three weeks now with no communications, but instead she fires one for Anderson, one for Legion, one for Mordin, one for Williams, one for her own deadened soul.

Roughly, a hand wraps around hers, releasing her finger from the trigger before pulling the gun away, and she sees Cortez hold it at a distance as he pulls Shepard against his chest with his free hand. There's a click as he empties the heat sink before dropping the gun, but Shepard doesn't have the energy to feel angry at being treated like a child. She barely even has the strength to hold onto Cortez, but the steady thrum of his heart against her ear is comforting in its regularity.

"Shepard, it's dead." Cortez murmurs. "You won."

"I don't feel like I won." Her voice is raspy from disuse. She feels Cortez's arms tighten strongly around her - surprise, maybe, that she's finally speaking again. When they were aboard the Normandy, he had always been stoic and professional, except for that afternoon when when he'd spoken of Robert and their last conversation.

Shepard can for the first time truly grasp the words in that recording. Don't let me be an anchor. Only now she hangs around Cortez's neck as the one weighing him down, and she's dying, alright, just a lot slower than Robert had been.

She imagines that her heart will just stop one night, probably soon. People who do the things that she's done don't get to just keep _breathing_ when they've taken that right from so many others - three hundred thousand batarians, countless geth, a half dozen friends. The weight has to crush her eventually, she reasons. Their blood will never been clean from her hands and her mind will never be free from their whispers.

"It's like you told me." Cortez tells her in a harsh whisper against her ear. "We have to survive, remember? Like the SSV London."

Shepard looks at the corpse again, taking in its long, crooked fingers, reaching permanently for the sky. There are no clues as to what this banshee might have been before it became so deformed, and even though it's utterly irrational she sees the vibrant commando Lieutenant Kurin, riddled with bullets - Shepard's bullets, fired from her shuttle pilot's rifle in the dead of night.

* * *

**August 7, 2186 CE: SSV Normandy, London Docks**

**Eleven Weeks Post Reaper War**

Doctor Karin Chakwas has rarely hesitated to file a report. She's always been a consummate professional, and takes pride in that. Never a report late, never a complaint from any of her patients. And she's seen many throughout the years. But Shepard's report has been sitting on her desk aboard the Normandy for a week now.

The commander's only thirty-two, and to file that report will effectively put an end to her military career.

It's accurate, of course. Shepard sustained enough damage to her right leg that it will likely never work properly again, and even with the mechanized device inserted into her thigh she still won't be able to nearly match her earlier pace. Couple that with the damage to her cybernetics and her biotic implant, and, well. No one can predict with a hundred percent accuracy what would happen if Shepard stepped onto a battlefield again, but Chakwas can see that the soldier's damaged body simply wouldn't hold up. Her heart could give out, or her implant could flare, or…

It doesn't matter. The report has to be filed, and that's that.

Chakwas had insisted to the newly appointed Admiral Coats that she was uncomfortable passing judgement on something like this, but was told that Shepard would see no other doctor after what was being described as "an incident" involving a dead Reaper asari. Apparently the commander had fired a full heat sink into the corpse before being led away from the scene by Lieutenant Cortez, and for two weeks afterward she didn't speak a word until the Normandy had arrived, safe and sound, back in London's docks; even then she had simply asked to see Major Alenko.

The major was the one who suggested seeing Dr. Chakwas when all else failed. It was a bittersweet reunion, hard for the doctor to swallow that the frail woman being led into the temporary medical center was the same woman who had herself once led the Normandy so fearlessly. Throughout the meeting, Shepard refused to relinquish her vice grip on Major Alenko's arm, and Chakwas had needed to physically pull the commander's hand off when it was time to sedate her to safely check over her cybernetics.

"How are you holding up?" She asked the major, then, as they both watched Shepard sink artificially into what seemed to be her first moment of peace in a long time. She still thought of him as the idealistic lieutenant with the migraines, tossing Corporal Jenkins around with biotics in the cargo bay, but to see him standing there older and wiser in so many ways made her throat tighten with sentimentality.

"It's tough." He replied simply, folding his arms across his chest. "I don't know what to do for her, Doctor."

"I think you're already doing it, Major. She's a fighter, always has been. She'll fight this, too."

Over the next few weeks, her prediction came true: Shepard began to show signs of steady improvement, even bringing a bottle of Serrice Ice Brandy to one of her physical therapy sessions and showing her old spirit in small ways - a smile here or a wry comment there.

But Shepard would likely never be the same and, as time wore on, Chakwas became to realize that she wouldn't truly recover physically, either. The damage was simply too great, the delay in treatment too long. If it weren't for an anonymous tip to the Alliance brass detailing her location, Shepard may never have been found.

Her eyes flick over the datapad, detailing a lifetime of achievements in just a under a decade, from the Skyllian Blitz to the defeat of the Reapers.

She presses send.


	2. Javik -- Liara

**A/N (RE: Chapter 1 Guest Review): **

_Guest wrote:_  
_You realize that in the world of mass effect, new body parts and organs can be cloned right? It is mentioned in ME3 and that it only takes about six months to do. Shepard could just have one cloned. It doesn't make sense that her carrier would be ruined when this is an option for her._

Hm, maybe, but IIRC that's no longer an option after a wound has been exposed to infection (per an in-game conversation between a doctor and a soldier about the soldier's imminent amputation in Huerta Memorial). The main issue, for me, when considering Shepard's health while writing this was that I always assumed Shepard's Cerberus upgrades were not widely available to begin with (particularly given that the Lazarus Project cost 4 billion credits) and they probably become unavailable altogether once Cerberus goes kaput.

So I figured, given the amount of damage from the blast, the time spent under the unsanitary Citadel rubble, the lack of replacement upgrades, etc…Chakwas, who wants the best for Shepard, would naturally have to advise against putting the commander back onto the field.  
In my opinion Shepard would not survive that destroy explosion and bounce back even close to where s/he'd been before. Could be just a matter of differing interpretations, or maybe I missed something more concrete about the extent of Shep's rebuilding and how it all works together - feel free to let me know, I always look forward to Mass Effect discussions :)

* * *

**September 5, 2186 CE: Vancouver**

**Fifteen Weeks Post Reaper War**

The asari people are only brilliant because the Protheans made them so. That is the truth.

It is also the reason why Javik does not have any desire to read the book that he and Dr. T'Soni worked on together. He knows too much already about life in the Empire - much more than he knows about life in this cycle - but the asari asks him to read through it anyway in one of her regular visits to his current residence in the Earth city Vancouver. The living space was given to him by the humans in exchange for some of his DNA, and though Javik doubts that cloning Protheans is as simple a matter as cloning the primitives, he cannot help but feel a bit of hope.

There are many human soldiers in this city, though what Commander Shepard told him holds true and they do not fight now to conquer other races. Nor do they allow the commander to rule over everyone, as would have been customary in his cycle: all weaker beings must obey the strongest.

Instead, once she was cleared to move from London, the commander took up residence in a large Vancouver home that once belonged the biotic soldier's family with the biotic, the James soldier and the Joker pilot. They likely plan, Javik reasons, to breed. Although he has learned that speaking to humans of their breeding rituals is considered confoundingly rude in this cycle, he is of the opinion that to breed with the sickly Joker pilot would only lessen the commander's genes in an offspring.

When he expresses this to Dr. T'Soni, she blinks her two eyes and tells him that humans generally breed with those they love, and that Commander Shepard does not love the Joker pilot in such a way.

"Good." Javik retorts. "She is a hero and he cannot even walk."

"He's the best pilot in the Alliance. _And_ a friend."

Her information trading, as she calls it, has made her a very dangerous person in this lifetime where intelligence is valued as much as strength, and still he finds it impressive that she refuses to bow her words to him like many others have done in his short time here. She says whatever she cares to. Her assertion is correct, besides - the pilot makes these primitive ships move almost like they were Prothean. If living in this time has taught him anything, it's that humans have proven to be more resilient than he could have ever guessed.

"I came to ask about our book." Dr. T'Soni reminds him. "I wanted you to look at the illustrations. My research has never really been taken seriously because of my age, so this...this is important to me."

"You are concerned about age, yet you are asking advice from someone decades behind you in the aging process."

"_Javik._"

"I will look." He allows, holding out a hand.

Dr. T'Soni gives him the datapad and he bows his head to look it over. He had intended to scroll through it only briefly, to give her the courtesy of appearing interested, only...he finds that the asari has not only mastered the skill of writing, but some of the drawings are as detailed as looking through a memory shard. With the datapad clutched tightly in his hand and time forgotten, he looks back over things he remembers, things he had never known, ruins of his people and illustrations of glory long elapsed. They are beautiful.

There were no real artists in the Empire. In the distant past, perhaps there had been many, but by the time Javik came to be the Reapers had already arrived and if you were able to hold a gun, that was what you did. He runs a finger along a drawing of Ilos - senses Dr. T'Soni's wonderment at the Prothean people on this datapad and is inexplicably grateful for it - before handing it back to her.

"I request no changes."

"None?"

"It is satisfactory." He tells her with an affirmative nod. "I imagine it will become a prominent book."

"Thank you." Dr. T'Soni says quietly.

"Where will this peace take you now that your work is complete?"

"To Thessia, to rebuild." The asari says, and he can see a spark in her, a truth that without even touching her he can confirm: she will see it done.

"And will you return here?"

She cocks her head to the left, studying him with eyes the color of the sky just before midnight. There is no word in the Prothean language that translates strictly to _lonely,_ but Javik has a rudimentary grasp of the word and knows that he is alone in this universe and in this time of peace he often wishes he were not.

"Most of the relays are up and running. It would only take a matter of hours to get back here once in awhile." She pauses. "Or you could come with me, if you'd like to. Perhaps there are other beacons on Thessia."

The asari people are only brilliant because the Protheans made them so. That is the truth. _This_ asari is brilliant because her mind and her heart are both finely honed tools in their own right, a rare feat and one that makes the last Prothean honored to have survived 50,000 years to know her.

"I would like that," Javik replies.


	3. Kaidan, Part 1

Major Kaidan Alenko's first Alliance post-war operation is an easy one: repair some generators in a small human colony, get their shields running again and leave.

The colony, hit by the Reapers early in the war, had been by and large decimated. Still, there were pockets of angry colonists in some of the higher population sectors, along with nearby mercs who had swept in hoping to clear out any remaining resources of value.

Everybody aboard the Normandy had been granted extended leave after finally making their way back to London but Kaidan needs the familiarity of Alliance life, the routine of it all, so he'd requested the Normandy for the operation with just a skeleton crew aboard, Joker in the pilot's chair and Lieutenant Vega running the shuttles. It was an easy drop. No additional ground team necessary. He'd even had Vega drop him off in a half-stocked but easily maneuverable Kodiak, leaving the slower Mako that the lieutenant preferred behind. Speed, precision, in and out.

By mid-morning, he's passed at least a dozen flattened buildings and two merc bands - mostly vorcha, offshoots from the Blood Pack, he reasons - and is nearing the colony's Defense Center where the shield controls are housed.

He entertains the thought of getting some asari mead wine at one of the makeshift shops in Vancouver when they get back. It had been a tough few months for all of them. It would be nice to relax, and besides, living with Vega and Joker was cause enough to get a little wine.

More than a little.

He's almost lost himself in his plans when he turns a corner and comes smack upon an irate man brandishing a pistol at a teenage girl. He drops to a defensive position without even thinking bout it - it's like something snaps immediately into place and his instincts kick in as though he hasn't even been off the field for a single day. He can feel the blue tendrils of his biotics flicking over his armor as he creeps closer.

"I saw you put the credit chit in your pocket," the man is saying. "Give it to me."

"Get lost." She spits at the ground near his feet and reaches for something on her hip as he lunges at her.

"You little bitch!"

_Crack -_

In the next second the man falls to the ground, gasping and gripping his leg, and the girl stands over him with a look of utter contempt on her face as she lifts one boot-clad foot and places it on his injured leg. They both spot Kaidan at the same time, and the man reaches one bloodied hand into the air.

"Help me! She tried to rob me -"

"Shut up." The girl says, and with a twist of her slender ankle she grinds her boot into his wound; his howls of pain don't seem to faze her in the slightest. "You'll live. But if he tries to help you, I'll put another hole in you, this time in your head. Are we clear?"

The man sputters out a protest while Kaidan takes in the girl: she's little more than a tower of twigs and skin, covered in dirt with an assault rifle clutched tightly in one hand, pointed determinedly at the would-be mugger. Her long, stringy hair that may have at one point been a light brown is tied over one shoulder with a thick strip of cloth and her right cheek looks to be mostly a crusted gash.

This girl can't possibly be older than sixteen or so. "You should come with me." Kaidan finds himself saying, speaking right over the man's groans.

The girl scratches a dark scab on her arm and watches him carefully with clear teal eyes which remind him of the endless sea at his parents' home in English Bay - his home, now. For a fleeting moment, he's struck with homesickness. He was around this girl's age when he had arrived from school to see two men at his doorstep.

One had on a dark blue suit and the other a black one, both pristinely pressed from the collar to the last button. The blue man had spoken to his mother in soft, quiet tones that were at odds with the words he was saying, words like _exposure_ and _unstable_ and _aberration._

His mother, a tall, elegant woman from Choa Chu Kang who had at one point in her life been breathtakingly beautiful, listened to their every word with wide amber eyes but had held her ground and steadfastly refused to send him away with them. It was his father who eventually signed the papers to send him to Brain Camp, but it was also his father who had come to pick Kaidan up two years later and shielded him from the fallout after the incident with Commander Vyrnnus.

He misses his father. It's not a conscious thought so much as it is a tugging at his chest and a half-realized memory before the girl speaks again. She tells him that she won't go as the mugger moans on the ground.

"The fighting is only going to get worse from here on out." Kaidan says softly.

"So the Alliance is going to save only me? Not likely."

It's only when she hooks her rifle back on her belt that Kaidan realizes how big it is - or rather how small she is. She's younger than he originally thought, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and she kicks at the ground in a surprisingly childlike gesture before starting back down the way he came.

"Don't -" Kaidan starts to say, but his next words stick in his throat as the girl reaches for the gun and points it squarely at his face with a smooth, practiced motion.

"Leave me alone." She hisses. He doesn't want to hurt her and this isn't the time for an ego trip just to prove he could stop her, so he holds up his hands in surrender and backs up a few steps to let her brush by him.

In the time it takes her to flit away - a praying mantis disappearing around a corner, all elbows and knobby knees - he's barely even taken a breath. He doesn't feel quite right leaving her to just wander around, but he's a soldier, first and foremost. He needs to get to the generator and get it running again, not worry about some street urchin who just threatened to put a bullet in his skull. She'll be okay.

He crouches briefly next to the man to apply some medi-gel. He still one more application in his light armor's storage, not that he's likely to need it to reset generators.

Without so much as a murmur of thanks, the mugger hauls to his feet and reaches for his pistol. Kaidan steps on the gun, pinning it to the ground.

"You'd better just go." He says.

* * *

Kaidan makes quick work of the three generators that need repairs in the Defense Center. The hum of electricity tells him that he got everything running again, so he makes his way over to the console to re-activate the shields.

"It won't work until you turn off the safety block. It automatically shuts down anything that drains too much power."

He spins around, drawing from his biotics at the unfamiliar voice, but drops his arms to his side when he sees the girl from the street accompanied by a turian. A female turian, and a young one, at that; he's no expert in turian aging, but her head plates aren't even completely formed. She's possibly even younger than her human friend.

The human girl smiles broadly - proudly, even, as she jerks her sharp chin toward the turian. "We saw an Alliance shuttle fly by, so I figured maybe you weren't lying after all. Etessa's going to help you. Her dad was an engineer."

He tries not to think about the use of the word _was_ to describe these kids' parents. "What's a turian doing on a human colony?" Kaidan asks instead as Etessa starts her work.

"It's officially an outreach program, but among turians it's well known to be a punishment of sorts. It says that you weren't strong enough to protect our own people." She pauses, tilting her head toward the console in front of her. "But my father had honor. He kept this place running until the Reapers came."

"Essi knows what she's doing." The human girl says.

That she does, Kaidan realizes as the turian's fingers work quickly at the console. For a moment, all three generators shut down, but she holds up a gray taloned hand and they sputter back to life, the console whirring as it switches the holo screen from red to orange. He would have figured it out eventually, he figures, but it's speeding things up significantly to have someone there who knows the quirks of the place.

"It needs your authorization."

He runs his omnitool over the input sensor to sync up the codes. The human girl leans over the console as it flickers to green, startling Kaidan - when had she made her way over here? - and rests her elbows on the metal keyboard.

"Are we going?" she lets the word hang in the air like a challenge, but he doesn't respond to her, instead pressing on his earpiece.

"Lieutenant, shields are up. Requesting pickup at the Defense Center. I have two civilians with me."

There's a disconcerting pop before Vega's voice comes back in his ear: "On my way. Look out, Major. Mercs heading your way. They must've seen you go in. I'll take out as many as I can, but -"

Whatever Vega says next, it's drowned out by the sound of glass breaking and earsplitting gunfire.

"Just get here ASAP!" Kaidan shouts as he drops easily into a defensive position behind the counter. The human girl huddles in a crouch next to him, her rifle gripped tightly in one hand. She leans out and fires off a shot, then two more, before leaning back and screwing her eyes shut. She's not hurt - she's afraid, he realizes.

If he were alone, he'd have tossed a grenade and been long out of there by now, but he can't see the turian and won't risk blowing up a civilian, least of all a_ child._ Instead, Kaidan throws out a warp field as a few more vorcha run into the room, then instinctively backs up as something warm and blue sprays across his armor and part of his neck - blood? - and pushes a biotic throw toward his field, blowing out the windows and sending two more of the mercenaries flying.

Kaidan can hear the hum of the shuttle's thrusters outside and Vega's voice in his earpiece: Come on! You've got a path! as he steps in front of the human girl and gives her a hard shove toward the broken windows, his barrier crackling out as a bullet catches him in the left arm with a white hot pain.

He thinks he shouts at her to go to the shuttle, only he can't be certain as he realizes that the turian has been shot, too, while he grabs for her, pulling her to his chest. He struggles to hold onto Etessa with one hand while maintaining a biotic barrier around them both, but he hauls her toward the shuttle as quickly as he can.

It's only about thirty or forty feet before they're outside and he sees the mountainous form of James Vega running toward him. Kaidan pushes the turian into Vega's arms before leaning his good hand on his knee and taking a second to catch his ragged breath.

It proves to be a mistake: another pain, this one in his left side, tells him he's been hit again. Kaidan shots the offending vorcha squarely in the head and stumbles the short distance to the shuttle, gasping heavy air into his lungs. He slips on something - his own blood, he realizes dimly, detached from the situation. The human girl grips his arms and, with strength that he thinks lethargically is beyond her, pulls him into the shuttle.

"Everyone in?" Vega booms from the pilot's seat, and Kaidan musters a breath.

"Go," he says.

He hoists himself upright with a massive effort and checks the medi-gel dispenser. Empty. His light armor has only one application left after the run-in with the mugger, and his fingers slide in blood - some blue and some red - as he kneels back down next to Etessa, who's sprawled on her back, watching him warily with her strange black eyes rimmed in green. Eyes like Vyrnnus's, he thinks, but swallows the thought and applies the medi-gel to the exposed wound on the turian's neck.

Once he's sure it's working, he pushes back using his heels until his back is resting as best he can against the shuttle's seat. The shuttle itself is swimming and he feels his consciousness waning, but he knows that he made the right choice. Turian or human…this young woman has a lot of life in front of her.

"Vega," he manages. "Got any medi-gel?"

"None up here." Vega answers, looking back and giving a grunt of surprise when he sees the bloody mess. "Shit, L2, isn't there any in the dispenser?"

"Empty." Kaidan barks out, laughing a bit at the nickname, but that only seems to make Vega more nervous.

"Mierda. I must've…shit, Major." Vega says. Too loudly, or too quietly. Too something, or maybe that's just the ringing in Kaidan's ears. Vega's form is kneeling next to him, and briefly Kaidan has the wherewithal to wonder if the shuttle's on autopilot before the thought escapes him altogether.

_Come on, Major, stay with us._ Is that worry in Vega's voice? A couple of snaps near his face. Funny how a guy like Vega can become a doctor of sorts in a moment like this. Kaidan laughs again, but it seems to be coming through slowly and he chokes on something that he desperately hopes isn't more blood.

"You can use this -" the human girl's voice rings out. Too loud. Definitely too loud.

"Gimme that."

That's not directed at Kaidan, so he lets himself be lulled into the expanse of black that's waiting just outside the corners of his vision.

* * *

When he comes to, he's laid flat out on the floor. Vega's still hovering over him, so he can't have been out for long. The human girl is standing with her slender arms folded, watching them both, and the turian must be in the co-pilot's chair - he can see her feet on the metal floor.

"Did you find some medi-gel?" He rasps.

Kaidan moves his arm; it hurts like hell, but it's tied tightly with a cloth torn from who knows what and the bleeding has mostly stopped. His side seems fine, and he touches it experimentally.

"Dios mio, Alenko. I wasn't sure you were gonna make it after you went lights out." Vega scrubs a hand over his face. "The girl here rigged the spare armor. Did something to the self-healing system. Not enough for both points of entry, but we got the worse of the two."

"The recent ones all have a central medi-gel compartment." The girl offers, and Kaidan nods gratefully, not bothering to wonder right now where a girl like this would have ever been in contact with Alliance gear.

"Thanks."

"Major, I fucked up. Sir." Vega adds.

"You warned me this shuttle wasn't fully stocked and I didn't listen. I thought this was going to be simple and it cost me." Vega opens his mouth to argue and Kaidan holds up his good hand. "Get us off of autopilot, Lieutenant."

As Vega returns to the cockpit, the girl stands above her seat, looking around and finally sitting with her rifle clutched in her lap. Her eyes, though, continue to shoot around the shuttle and her jaw is tight.

"It would have been simple if you hadn't stopped for Essi." She mumbles.

He makes a noncommittal noise. The truth is, she's right, but so is he - he should have been better prepared. Parameters change all the time and these past few months have made him rusty.

"Not many humans would have saved a turian like that."

"How old are you?" Kaidan asks, exhausted suddenly, as though there's only so much energy to go around and the girl is using it all. He gives a low growl of pain as he shifts his weight to stand, feeling a warm, fresh leak of blood out of the wound in his arm.

"Only if you tell me first."

He sighs. "Thirty-six."

She gives a low whistle that he finds to be distinctly offensive, but since she may very well have just saved his life he keeps his expression flat.

"Are you married?" The girl asks.

"No. What's your name?"

"Do you even have a girlfriend?"

"That's not really..."

"Okay, okay. I think I already know the answer, anyway. You're Alenka, right? Before comms shut off, I saw you on the vids talking about being a Spectre. Your face was all jacked up but Khalisah Al-Jilani said you were 'known to gallivant with Commander Shepard.'"

Her shrill Al-Jilani impression is amusingly spot-on, but the way she says Shepard's name is irreverent - almost sarcastic - and he feels a pang of anger. To everyone he's ever met and ever will meet Shepard is a savior. To Kaidan, she'll always be the woman who on one hand never failed to tease him and on the other made him see his world in color again. A savior, yes, but in a very different way.

He doesn't give the girl the satisfaction of denying the rumors or correcting his name. She sits back contentedly regardless, like a lawyer who's just presented irrefutable evidence. It's good to take his mind off of the burning pain in his arm and she's not wrong, anyway, even if her information is a year old.

"So you did serve with Commander Shepard?" The girl asks, but there's a strain to her voice, a lilt that says she's trying to act too casual and failing at it.

"How old are you?" He repeats.

"Fourteen. Do you know anything about the Normandy?"

She's only answering him now to get the information that she wants and Kaidan knows it. Before he can answer her Lieutenant Vega's voice fills the shuttle from the cockpit.

"Vega to Normandy. On track for return." He says. "ETA two minutes. Me and the major plus two. Get the med bay ready, Kaidan's hit."

Joker's voice comes back over the Kodiak's comm: "Ready for your arrival, ground team. I thought we weren't doing extractions. What'd you find?"

"A couple of civilians who needed extraction, Lieutenant." Kaidan leaves no room for argument, and he can practically hear Joker rolling his eyes.

"Aye, Major. Ready."


	4. Joker, Part 1

Joker dreams often that he's chasing Gunny. They're at the farm, running between huge laser farm equipment with the commerce ships flying overhead. Every time, she tilts her head up toward the sky, her auburn hair twisting in the wind, and looks at him with black irises. Without moving her lips, she says_ they're not coming for us._

It's not a question. It's never a question.

Sixteen years his sister's senior, he had promised her when she was barely two weeks old that he would protect her, whispering in her baby-soft ear one night as he held her tiny form. She had latched one miniature hand onto his pinky; in that moment, one of only a few like it in his life, his Vrolik syndrome didn't matter. He was nothing less than her big brother and he would keep her safe. Always.

As a fifteenth birthday present from their father, Gunny had made the trip to Vancouver after Joker was detained there. She was giggly and excited to be away from Tiptree. Farm life didn't suit her imagination, but living on the farm she had grown up to be tree-like herself: tall and willowy and full of life. The wild, untamable hair of her youth had softened into autumn-colored curls like their mother's, but her freckles had only grown more pronounced over the years. Her loud laughter was Joker's favorite thing about her, though; it was rotund and flighty and brilliantly contagious.

Gunny had asked breathlessly if she could meet _the_ Commander Shepard. Although the answer was no - even if he could have convinced Vega, he couldn't have convinced Alliance brass, since technically he was under investigation for his work with Cerberus - he and his sister had spent hours sitting side-by-side on the couch in his temporary apartment, going through holos and datapads while Joker recounted his tales of adventure and embellished only a little. She had asked if the Reapers were really coming.

"Yeah." He'd nudged his shoulder against hers. "But I've heard that Moreau guy's a pretty decent pilot, he's only blown up one ship and everything. I'll take care you. Like I always do."

"Okay." She had pushed her hair away from her face, leaning toward him with the constant earnest that he loved - hell, as cynical as he was he even often envied that about her. "Don't tell dad, alright? But I think I'm going to join the Alliance and maybe I'm going to be a pilot, too. We have this flight sim at school and I did really well. Everybody thought it was really cool that you fly the Normandy."

"You were bragging about me?"

"I didn't even have to. You're, like, famous in Tiptree, Jeffy. Nobody even talks about your bones. You're just Commander Shepard's personal pilot, the guy who's going to send Reapers back to hell."

Speaking like that, she had reminded him of Shepard, in a way. Maybe it was the way that she was so sure in her ideals, or maybe it was something simpler, like the way that she punctuated the air with her hands. Not that Shepard had done that at all since the end of the war. Some days Shepard didn't speak at all.

All the people who try to tell him that his sister's in a better place are liars. None of them believe it. They're thinking of their relatives, their lovers, who made it through the war and they're grateful for it; if it were truly so much better, why wouldn't they put a pillow over their own sisters' faces? Why are they so sorry if she's so much better off?

Jack had been the one whose words brought the most comfort: "Death kicks your ass as much as it can," she'd said softly at the war memorial service in London, looking somewhere over Joker's shoulder, "but you can't let it beat you. Get through it and find the orange light."

He wasn't sure if it was a prison saying or just something Jack had made up. Shit, he wasn't even sure what it meant, but before he could ask she had slipped around a group of strangers and disappeared. She was good at that.

* * *

By the time everyone's back on board, Joker has made his way back to the cockpit, passing a bleeding Kaidan and a turian who seems attached to his hip. Both the pilot and co-pilot chairs are empty, as always, even though he tried to make the place seem a little bit like old times by hanging a holo of EDI off to the left. Some days, he knows, it helps more than others.

A wisp of a girl hovers near the bridge. She watches him sit in his chair and gradually makes her way closer, stopping every so often to look at this or that piece of equipment.

"Are you hurt?" Joker asks her after she flits around for a minute or two.

"No, I'm Mayna." She gives a snort of laughter at her own stupid joke and folds her arms. "Is this ship harder to fly than other ships?"

"Yeah, I guess. There's more to it."

"So you're the only one who can?"

Probably not, but he's the only one who could fly it as well as he does so he nods. Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion. Besides, this is his baby - the Normandy is and always will be his ship.

"You're Jeffrey Moreau?"

No one - _no one_ - refers to him as Jeffrey. Hell, the only time he can remember being called that, ever, was at his flight school graduation. "I guess."

She inches closer, looking at the control holo with huge globes of eyes. "I'm Mayna. I wasn't lying about that or anything."

She's dirty and thin and sharp: sharp elbows, sharp chin, sharp gaze. She sits uninvited in the co-pilot's chair. EDI's chair.

"Can I help you with something?" Joker asks.

"Can I fly it?" Mayna touches the holo screen in front of her and flips through it with a reckless ease that makes Joker nervous. "I've flown a flew shuttles, Jeffrey."

"First of all, this is a frigate. Not the same thing at all. And you're, like, thirteen," he scoffs, but he checks to make sure that the co-pilot controls are off - he'd rather not give control of the Thanix cannons to this clearly deranged teenager, thank you very much.

"I'm fifty." Mayna assures him. She laughs, a soft brook of a laugh. It's the opposite of Gunny's, but all the same it reminds him of her. "I age in reverse."

"So you're going to die in thirteen years?"

"Fourteen." She answers, her mouth slipping into a sly smile.

"Well, sorry about your short life span and your imaginary medical condition."

"You know what we should do?"

"I'm not activating the co-pilot controls."

"I wasn't going to ask you to." Mayna swings her skinny legs, scuffing her boots along the floor. Mud flakes off of them in clumps. "I was going to say that we could play a game. I'll ask you a question and if you answer it with the truth, then I have to answer it too."

"Who says I want to know anything about you?" Joker asks. It comes out more harshly than he'd expected, but he truthfully doesn't care; who the hell does this girl think she is? She's like a foolish, grimy version of Gunny, she's getting dirt all over EDI's spot, and he won't play her stupid game.

"Where are your parents?" She asks, as though he hadn't interrupted at all.

"Gone." He finally answers after a lengthy pause, looking down at the controls spread out in front of him.

"My dad shot my mom." Her legs stop their incessant movement. For a few long seconds, the only noise in the cockpit is the hum of the engines. "He was afraid she was going to turn into one of those husks. She got scratched really bad. He thought it was like zombies or something, I guess. They got him anyway, but I'm small enough to hide in the vents."

_Swish. Swish. _Her feet resume their swinging, but the heavy sadness in her voice sends a chill down Joker's neck and he suddenly feels guilty for snapping at her. She's _fourteen_. Shit. This war...

" - is the worst thing that's ever happened to you?"

"What?" Joker asks.

"I said, while you're working, what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you?"

"I stubbed my toe on my way to the bathroom once. That hurt."

_Shepard floating into space. A screen blinking red with the news that Tiptree had fallen. A gray steel casket for Rick Jenkins. _And a stubbed toe, of course, the kind that had broken three bones in his foot.

"You're lying," says Mayna.

"You asked a stupid question that you couldn't even answer." This time, his tone is light. He's warming up to this strange girl, he supposes, and besides, it's nice to have more to listen to than the sound of, you know, space.

She considers, lips pursed, and then grins.

"Fair. But I did have a job. I was in charge of helping my mom fly the cargo ships to other colonies. So can I fly now?"

"No." He says. "You can't. My turn to ask a question, though. How did you know my name?"

She rolls her eyes, leaning back in her chair. "Waste of a question. I watch the news, Jeffrey. I had an extranet connection."

"Fair." Joker echoes, eliciting a small smile from the girl.

"What's that a holo of?"

With all the novelty of the game gone in an instant, Joker reaches up and turns off the holo. EDI disappears. Maybe one day he'll know what the hell Jack was talking about, but today isn't that day.


End file.
